There
has always been a creative mistress leading Jon Hurwitz W00 astray.
Its an alluring thing called comedic screenwriting, and it has taken
him a long way from the Wharton School and his goal of becoming an
investment banker.

Hurwitzs
high-school pal, Hayden Schlossberg, had a similar infatuation. But
both of them were realistic enough to know that a screenwriting career
would have to wait until they had made some money working real jobs.
In the meantime, they continued to develop ideas together. And when
Hurwitz saw a book for sale one day during his sophomore yearone
remarkably similar to an idea he and Schlossberg had developed in
high schoolhe decided their pursuit of a writing career couldnt
wait.

He
called Schlossberg, who attended the University of Chicago, and told
him to move to Philadelphia that summer and live in his off-campus
house at 4007 Baltimore Avenue so they could write. They got responsible
day jobs, and at night they wrote a 250-page version of their first
screenplay, Filthyinitially called Outside the Boxabout
two best friends trying to figure out what to do after college. It
was, by their account, good material formatted badly.

During
Hurwitzs junior year they began to get the hang of the art form,
and trimmed 140 pages from the manuscript. By the spring of 2000,
they sold Filthy, graduated, and moved to Hollywood.

Four
years later, theyve found commercial success and critical recognition
as the writers of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, which
A.O. Scott of the The New York Times described as one of the
few recent comedies that persuasively, and intelligently, engage the
social realities of contemporary multicultural America.

Hurwitz
spoke with Gazette freelancer Kent Malmros C00 about his journey
as a screenwriter, and Harold & Kumar.

Did you know while you were writing the script for Harold &
Kumar that it had the potential to become a mainstream studio
film?

When
you write a stoner comedy with Asian and Indian lead characters, you
should know that no studio in town would ever consider buying or making
it. If they do buy the script, you figure theyll have you change
it to a couple of white guys, or a white guy and a black guy. We never
wanted to do that, but at the time it was the project we felt the
most passionate about. So we decided to write the movie.

What was the inspiration for the lead characters?

Hayden
and I started writing movies because we felt we could write funnier
and more realistic characters than those we were currently seeing
in youth comedies. Since we had a lot of Asian and Indian friends,
we always included a lot of Asian and Indian characters in our movies.

One day, we just said, What if, instead of making the Asian-American
characters in our script side-characters, what if we made them the
main attraction? Since Hayden and I always try to say a little something
in our movies, we felt that this sort of unique set-up would allow
us to write a movie that examines the racial climate of America, while
still keeping the ridiculous and irreverent tone of a youth comedy.
Plus, we liked the idea of writing something that was unique. Usually,
the Asian guy is either doing martial arts or answering a scientific
question, but in our movie we were delving deeper into the lives of
these characters.

It must have been particularly difficult to balance the accurate
portrayal of certain races with the drug counterculture.

Exactly.
Were showing these two guys as stoners immediately in the movie.
But what weve always said is that this isnt a movie about the Asian-American
experience, or a movie about what all Indian people are like. This
is a movie about two characters, Harold and Kumar, and what theyre
like. They happen to be Asian and Indian. And they happen to be two
very real guys. Guys that are intelligentone of them is about to
go to med school; one of them is an investment banker. Yet they still
smoke weed.

The movie takes place exclusively in New Jerseyincluding a pivotal
scene at Princeton. As a Penn graduate, how did you let that happen?

We
wanted to make a movie that would be a Jersey road-trip movie. We
didnt want to complicate things by having them go to New York or
Philadelphia, and go over state lines. We felt it was very clean to
keep it all in New Jersey. Thats why they ended up going to Princeton.

But it does add an interesting dynamic to the movie that you chose
an Ivy League university. It was important to what you were trying
to accomplish with this movie.

Absolutely.
We were trying to establish that these were educated people, who hang
out with educated people.

In an ideal world I would have liked to use Penn if it was an Ivy
League School in New Jersey. We used Princeton because it actually
is an Ivy League school in New Jersey.

So we certainly werent running from writing a Penn movie. In fact,
we wrote an early script based at Penn, and hope to write movies that
take place at Penn in the future.

At what point did you stand back and realize you had made it in
Hollywood? Was it with the sale of this script?

It
was the collective experience of filming Harold & Kumar.
I had never really been on a movie setso the first time I was on
a movie set was to film a movie Hayden and I wrote. And we were fans
of a lot of the cast in the movie. For years, we talked about these
actors, and all of a sudden we found ourselves in Toronto with these
people, spending hours just shooting the shit with these guys, or
partying at night. Or wed watch them act out our scenes and help
them with their lines. For us that was the most surreal experience.

Whats next for you?

We are currently working on several projects, including The Gym
Teacher and The Wingmana big, commercial idea based on
the bar scene. Were also rewriting a parody of the Lord of the
Rings and Harry Potter movies.

On top of that, were very interested in moving into directing. We
learned a ton from [Harold & Kumar director] Danny Leiner.
And wed love to be able to complete our own vision from start to
finish on a movie. Weve had a number of studios approach us about
directing already. So were very hopeful of directing something over
the next couple of years.

Through our experiences weve moved into producing as well including
two projects with Josh Heald W00, one of my best friends from Penn.

The
end of Harold & Kumar suggests a sequela journey in Europe.
You didnt mention that, so is that project in development?

We have a deal in place to write the sequel, and have already been
sent to Europe on a research trip. And most of the sequel has already
been planned. However, were waiting to see how the movie does on
DVD before going through with it. The movie has been profitable, but
not big enough yet to warrant a sequel. Itll take a certain amount
of money through DVD sales for that project to get greenlit. We expect
that to happen, but well see.